Intel Preparing Multiple Hexacore Coffee Lake CPUs

[SpaceGhostC2C]

12 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

But will we get any quadcores with HT?

I'm not one to care about HT much (if it benefits from HT, it benefits even more from true cores, so why stop at 4: whatever extra threads you are running on the same cores will run much faster in their own separate cores), but I doubt Intel would just kill HT-enabled quad-cores. I mean, so far, this is a rumor, and the rumor concerns what they may be planning as the top CPUs of the consumer platform. It's far from a full lineup, and it's hard to believe Intel would leave that segment completely to Ryzen 5s.

[SteveGrabowski0]

11 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

(if it benefits from HT, it benefits even more from true cores, so why stop at 4: whatever extra threads you are running on the same cores will run much faster in their own separate cores), 

That's not borne out by tests on gaming though. The quadcore i7 routinely outperform the hexacore and octacore i7 even when the quadcore i7 is only clocked a couple hundred MHz faster. When Digital Foundry tested I think a 4.3 GHz i7-5960x vs a 4.5 GHz i7-6700k the only game the 6700k didn't win hands down was Crysis 3, and there the 5960x and 6700k traded blows. But in their testing on the 6700k and 6600k at the same clocks the 6700k was usually on top. So right now hyperthreaded quadcore i7 seem to be the best gaming cpus on the market. I doubt it changes until the next generation of consoles.

 

I'm just strictly looking from the perspective of a gamer. Not a streamer or someone who does much video editing.

[SteveGrabowski0]

20 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The original speculation was that the i3 would be a quad-core with the i5 getting HT while the i7 would be a hexa-core. Surprised to see Intel going this route.

Yeah the current i7s being rebranded i5 would have been sweet. If I could get an i7-7700 for say the $220 a locked i5-7600 sells for I'd be tempted to get one for a second gaming PC (one on my desk, one on my TV). But it probably makes more sense for Intel to keep six cores and just shut off HT to meet their power targets in chips that can't bin as i7s.

[Crosseyed Sniper]

This is great news for us Core-Whores! 

 

 

[ARikozuM]

11 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Yeah the current i7s being rebranded i5 would have been sweet. If I could get an i7-7700 for say the $220 a locked i5-7600 sells for I'd be tempted to get one for a second gaming PC (one on my desk, one on my TV). But it probably makes more sense for Intel to keep six cores and just shut off HT to meet their power targets in chips that can't bin as i7s.

Like @SpaceGhostC2C, I'd take 6 physical cores over eight HT cores since intelligent scheduling only does so much. 

[NoMercy]

I will definitely buy intel if

 

1) Can OC to 5ghz with AIO 240/280

2) Price at $330, max $350

3) Soldered

 

Definitely crushing ryzen 7 if they do it.

[MageTank]

Just now, NoMercy said:

I will definitely buy intel if

 

1) Can OC to 5ghz with AIO 240/280

2) Price at $330, max $350

3) Soldered

 

Definitely crushing ryzen 7 if they do it.

It's unlikely to be soldered, given what we just saw with X299. However, if it's built the same way as the other 1151 chips, the same delid tools should work. 

[Drak3]

26 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I'm not one to care about HT much (if it benefits from HT, it benefits even more from true cores, so why stop at 4: whatever extra threads you are running on the same cores will run much faster in their own separate cores), but I doubt Intel would just kill HT-enabled quad-cores. I mean, so far, this is a rumor, and the rumor concerns what they may be planning as the top CPUs of the consumer platform. It's far from a full lineup, and it's hard to believe Intel would leave that segment completely to Ryzen 5s.

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Like @SpaceGhostC2C, I'd take 6 physical cores over eight HT cores since intelligent scheduling only does so much. 

 

SMT/HTT has two crucial benefits, it mitigates thread locking, and it enables two threads to run at full, or damn near, performance if they're using completely separate resources. I'll take a hyperthreaded chip over a non-hyperthreaded chip so long as it has a minimum of 4 cores. 6 preferred.

[NoMercy]

Just now, MageTank said:

It's unlikely to be soldered, given what we just saw with X299. However, if it's built the same way as the other 1151 chips, the same delid tools should work. 

But x299 chips were rushed. That was their first answer to ryzen, so I can accept the fact that they answer it poorly. But now they have so much time to prepare, they should really do it better.

 

Anyway I list them in priority order, so soldered is the last one.

[Drak3]

1 minute ago, NoMercy said:

But x299 chips were rushed. That was their first answer to ryzen, so I can accept the fact that they answer it poorly. But now they have so much time to prepare, they should really do it better.

No, they weren't. That of X299 that got released, was planned for quite some time. Nothing changed on them. Intel added the Dodeca, quattuordeca, sexdeca, and octodecacores as a response to ThreadRipper. X99 was enough of an answer to Ryzen, achieving better clocks, better AVX performance, quad channel memory, and a better IMC, for those that needed/wanted an HEDT platform.

[NoMercy]

16 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

No, they weren't. That of X299 that got released, was planned for quite some time. Nothing changed on them. Intel added the Dodeca, quattuordeca, sexdeca, and octodecacores as a response to ThreadRipper. X99 was enough of an answer to Ryzen, achieving better clocks, better AVX performance, quad channel memory, and a better IMC, for those that needed/wanted an HEDT platform.

Well then i guess i have to consider delidding it.

[samcool55]

5 hours ago, Clanscorpia said:

Intel hasnt provided stock cooler on OCed chips since Skylake

True, but there will also be an i7-8700 with probably very similar clock speeds to the K-version and that will probably come with a stock cooler.

And looking at the current intel stock cooler and a 6-core 12-thread CPU with 4+Ghz clockspeeds, i don't see that ending well.

 

[Armakar]

What worries me as someone who will be looking to buy one of these is:

 

A) the fact that the 8700 non K is at 3.2GHZ and non overclockable. Something tells me they've put it at such a bad frequency far below what I expect the chip to be capable of because they want to charge a much larger amount for the K version to actually get expected intel performance.

B) the fact they are making a 6 core i5... without hyperthreading? AMD have made it pretty clear it's not hard or expensive to put Hyperthreading or SMT on a chip; intel clearly learned nothing from Ryzen and think they can get away with a 6c/6t i5? Nope, i'll take the 6c/12t Ryzen anyday.

 

Sincerely hope Intel lose more market share from this and become the next AMD;  plummeting their prices and changing CEO as a result of their stupidity this year and failure to compete.

[mynameisjuan]

1 hour ago, Armakar said:

changing CEO as a result of their stupidity this year and failure to compete.

So much one way bias. What about AMD and their failure to even come close to competing in the past 10 years? All this hate for Intel yet you ignore AMDs failure over the past years.

 

In terms of performance Intel is still competing as they are still king in performance. Price, not so much. 

[Jito463]

2 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

So much one way bias. What about AMD and their failure to even come close to competing in the past 10 years? All this hate for Intel yet you ignore AMDs failure over the past years.

 

In terms of performance Intel is still competing as they are still king in performance. Price, not so much. 

I read his quote that he meant Intel would have to do like AMD, and "X,Y,Z".  In other words, he was saying that it happened to AMD, so he was hoping it would happen to Intel.  I didn't see any ignoring the past mistakes AMD has made.

1 hour ago, Armakar said:

Sincerely hope Intel lose more market share from this and become the next AMD;  plummeting their prices and changing CEO as a result of their stupidity this year and failure to compete.

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

11 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

That's not borne out by tests on gaming though.

Of course it is supported by testing. The problem is that the tests you refer to later are nto tests of HT vs full cores: they test CPUs with different IPC, clock speeds, cache... With equal cores, 4 cores with HT is strictly worse at everything than 6 cores without HT.

11 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

The quadcore i7 routinely outperform the hexacore and octacore i7 even when the quadcore i7 is only clocked a couple hundred MHz faster. When Digital Foundry tested I think a 4.3 GHz i7-5960x vs a 4.5 GHz i7-6700k the only game the 6700k didn't win hands down was Crysis 3, and there the 5960x and 6700k traded blows.

So, higher IPC and higher clocks, and it won at gaming... how many threads were those games using? Because at 4 threads, of course it's going to win. Haswell-E vs. Skylake isn't really apples to apples comparison...

If you want a true a comparison about true cores vs fake cores, get a Ryzen 5 quad core and a Ryzen 5 hexacore, disable SMT in the hexacore, and run a game that uses more than 4 threads.

 

11 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

But in their testing on the 6700k and 6600k at the same clocks the 6700k was usually on top.

That's 4 cores vs 4 cores, though. It's not a test of physical cores vs. logical cores, it's almost a test of HT on vs. off... almost, because cache is still different. If you want to tell the difference that HT makes, you need 6700K HT on vs 6700K HT off. But that still won't tell you how much better 6 6700K cores are compared to 4 hyperthreaded cores for games that use more than 4 threads (if they use just 4, then you don't need more cores nor HT).

 

11 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

So right now hyperthreaded quadcore i7 seem to be the best gaming cpus on the market.

It may remain the sweetspot, no doubt, at least if priced reasonably. Which is why I don't see Intel not having a quadcore with HT in the Coffee Lake lineup.

 

10 hours ago, Drak3 said:

SMT/HTT has two crucial benefits, it mitigates thread locking, and it enables two threads to run at full, or damn near, performance if they're using completely separate resources.

Which never happens. It would imply near 100% improvements in performance from having HT on, while the most cherry-picked possible example won't give you more than a 40% boost (while on the other extreme you have negative effects, meaning you are better off switching it off).

Hence, even in the best case scenario, it remains very, very far from being as good as an additional core.

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, Sampsy said:

I don't understand why people think this is the case. It was only a few months before X299 came out that the rumours of the i9s appeared but 6 core coffeelake has been rumoured for years. 

What are you talking about? The first mention to i9s date back to like Sandy Bridge times...

 

(for example: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/296905-28-intel-release-date )

[MyName13]

2 hours ago, Armakar said:

What worries me as someone who will be looking to buy one of these is:

 

A) the fact that the 8700 non K is at 3.2GHZ and non overclockable. Something tells me they've put it at such a bad frequency far below what I expect the chip to be capable of because they want to charge a much larger amount for the K version to actually get expected intel performance.

B) the fact they are making a 6 core i5... without hyperthreading? AMD have made it pretty clear it's not hard or expensive to put Hyperthreading or SMT on a chip; intel clearly learned nothing from Ryzen and think they can get away with a 6c/6t i5? Nope, i'll take the 6c/12t Ryzen anyday.

 

Sincerely hope Intel lose more market share from this and become the next AMD;  plummeting their prices and changing CEO as a result of their stupidity this year and failure to compete.

But at the lower end you have to choose either ryzen 1400 (4c8t) or Intel's 6c6t CPU, I'd rather take those extra cores.

[SteveGrabowski0]

2 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Of course it is supported by testing. The problem is that the tests you refer to later are nto tests of HT vs full cores: they test CPUs with different IPC, clock speeds, cache... With equal cores, 4 cores with HT is strictly worse at everything than 6 cores without HT.

 

So, higher IPC and higher clocks, and it won at gaming... how many threads were those games using? Because at 4 threads, of course it's going to win. Haswell-E vs. Skylake isn't really apples to apples comparison...

If you want a true a comparison about true cores vs fake cores, get a Ryzen 5 quad core and a Ryzen 5 hexacore, disable SMT in the hexacore, and run a game that uses more than 4 threads.

Clock for clock is the problem though. The quadcores will usually clock higher than the hexacores. By going to hexacore with Coffee Lake Intel looks like they're trading off clockspeed for moar corez. For most people it's a good tradeoff, but not for gaming. Hardware Unboxed tested a 4.9 GHz 7700k vs a 4.7 GHz 7800X in gaming and the 7700k ran the table except for Watch Dogs 2, where the 7800X at 4.7 GHz inched ahead of the 7700k at 4.9 GHz. This is a more apples to apples comparison since Kaby Lake doesn't have any IPC improvements vs Skylake.

 

 

2 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It may remain the sweetspot, no doubt, at least if priced reasonably. Which is why I don't see Intel not having a quadcore with HT in the Coffee Lake lineup.

It's not just the sweetspot though, Intel's 4c/8t i7-7700k is the best gaming cpu right now. I personally wouldn't touch Coffee Lake's hexacores since it's really doubtful they'd be better than the 7700k for gaming in the short term unless they have a pretty big IPC improvement. And then in the long term they're not true octacores so when games are targeted at true octacores with decent IPC and clockspeeds in the next generation of consoles I'm not sure the higher clocks will help the Intel hexacores beat say the currently available Ryzen octacores. As a gamer these hexacores don't look appealing at all to me. And I don't think Intel having hexacores and AMD having hexacores and octacores in their mainstream lineups is going to convince devs to start targeting strong ipc + clock hexa and octacores since the current gen consoles are the lowest common denominator and are octacores with terrible IPC and very low clocks.

[Drak3]

53 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

The quadcores will usually clock higher than the hexacores.

Haswell and up, not really. The amount of heat generated by those 2 extra cores gets compensated by the larger area of the die releasing said heat, and power draw isn't an issue for those who plan accordingly.

[Taf the Ghost]

@SteveGrabowski0

 

 

With Skylake-X, there's a different L3 Cache system and that matters in anything that isn't a hard-single core title w/ an Nvidia GPU. We won't know which L3 system they're using until we get full announcements. 

[Noirgheos]

1 hour ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Clock for clock is the problem though. The quadcores will usually clock higher than the hexacores. By going to hexacore with Coffee Lake Intel looks like they're trading off clockspeed for moar corez. For most people it's a good tradeoff, but not for gaming. Hardware Unboxed tested a 4.9 GHz 7700k vs a 4.7 GHz 7800X in gaming and the 7700k ran the table except for Watch Dogs 2, where the 7800X at 4.7 GHz inched ahead of the 7700k at 4.9 GHz. This is a more apples to apples comparison since Kaby Lake doesn't have any IPC improvements vs Skylake.

 

 

It's not just the sweetspot though, Intel's 4c/8t i7-7700k is the best gaming cpu right now. I personally wouldn't touch Coffee Lake's hexacores since it's really doubtful they'd be better than the 7700k for gaming in the short term unless they have a pretty big IPC improvement. And then in the long term they're not true octacores so when games are targeted at true octacores with decent IPC and clockspeeds in the next generation of consoles I'm not sure the higher clocks will help the Intel hexacores beat say the currently available Ryzen octacores. As a gamer these hexacores don't look appealing at all to me. And I don't think Intel having hexacores and AMD having hexacores and octacores in their mainstream lineups is going to convince devs to start targeting strong ipc + clock hexa and octacores since the current gen consoles are the lowest common denominator and are octacores with terrible IPC and very low clocks.

The thing with Skylake-X is, the 7900X and the 7820X perform much better than the 7800X in games, even when clock speeds are taken into account. Just look at HWUnboxed's overall Skylake-X review. A little odd. Anyway,

 

HEDT losing to the mainstream in gaming is no surprise to anyone. It's been that way for a while. What hasn't been the case is a new mainstream i7 losing to its predecessor. Can't say for sure, but I think the 8700K will have some kind of odd boosting method. Quad-core boost to perhaps 4.4GHz, and all-core boost to maybe 4.2GHz? So if a game is using four cores or less, it could maintain 4.4GHz and therefore match the stock 7700K (and perhaps beat it with what little IPC improvements may stem from Coffee Lake), and if said game uses six, 4.2GHz.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

11 minutes ago, Noirgheos said:

The thing with Skylake-X is, the 7900X and the 7820X perform much better than the 7800X in games, even when clock speeds are taken into account. Just look at HWUnboxed's overall Skylake-X review. A little odd. Anyway,

 

HEDT losing to the mainstream in gaming is no surprise to anyone. It's been that way for a while. What hasn't been the case is a new mainstream i7 losing to its predecessor. Can't say for sure, but I think the 8700K will have some kind of odd boosting method. Quad-core boost to perhaps 4.4GHz, and all-core boost to maybe 4.2GHz? So if a game is using four cores or less, it could maintain 4.4GHz and therefore match the stock 7700K (and perhaps beat it with what little IPC improvements may stem from Coffee Lake), and if said game uses six, 4.2GHz.

 

I'd like to point out some of the conversations we've had around even these parts that the bolded statement isn't quite true.

 

As to the Skylake-X, some of the issue with the 6c vs 8c vs 10c seems to be about bandwidth on the Mesh. It's new tech on the "desktop" side of things, so we simply don't have enough advanced testing about its operation to really understand how it's interacting yet.  (Plus it's possible the games are reading the CPU's topology incorrectly, which would be its own issue.)

[Noirgheos]

Just now, Taf the Ghost said:

I'd like to point out some of the conversations we've had around even these parts that the bolded statement isn't quite true.

 

As to the Skylake-X, some of the issue with the 6c vs 8c vs 10c seems to be about bandwidth on the Mesh. It's new tech on the "desktop" side of things, so we simply don't have enough advanced testing about its operation to really understand how it's interacting yet.  (Plus it's possible the games are reading the CPU's topology incorrectly, which would be its own issue.)

Never said they always outright lose, just that if they do, no one is surprised.

 

Also, yeah, forget about the caching changes. They won't be present in Coffee Lake, so if performance issues on the 7800X are due to it, it should be alleviated with the 8700K. Odd that it doesn't seem to affect the 7820X and 7900X as much.

[Armakar]

4 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

So much one way bias. What about AMD and their failure to even come close to competing in the past 10 years? All this hate for Intel yet you ignore AMDs failure over the past years.

 

In terms of performance Intel is still competing as they are still king in performance. Price, not so much. 

And everyone hated AMD too, they were a joke for years. But then they actually got serious and gave it their all with Ryzen, which is a huge success. 

Yeah, Intel are king in performance still, but that doesn't matter when their processors to compete with Ryzen in heavy loads are thousands.

 

Bugatti make the Veyron, one of the fastest cars there is, but it's over a million dollars, so who really cares? A tiny portion of the world can actually afford it. Price means just as much as performance; take a look at Ryzen, if Ryzen's prices triple to match Intel's prices, suddenly it goes from great success to great failure.